(Love, hate, championship gold-credit: WWE.com)
The champ AJ regained her title putting the upstart in her place and the head games began with the "frienemies" angle. What made this fun was Paige's sly delivery and AJ's eye rolling congeniality that showed neither woman bought this for one minute – and the audience shouldn't either. Within the storyline, both women hated each other with a passion. To Paige, AJ was the force that was trying to destroy her career and take what she earned just as she got it. To AJ, Paige was a cheeky upstart who baited a trap her ego blinded her to.
Paige and AJ worked an oddly sloppy match at Battleground, which was disappointing, considering Paige is the first WWE Diva in the last 15 years to have so much technical skill at the age of 22. Also, AJ's been able to make vastly inferior workers like the Bellas, Eva Marie and Cameron look good, so their lack of in-ring chemistry has been a head scratcher as I watch a match that was so good at storytelling while at the same time riddled with speed bumps in the action. After that match, the feud continued to build, the "frienemy" snark and rhetoric was even more venomous and there was no real intention anymore to hide the anger building in both women.
Paige shoving AJ off the stage was a defining moment, as she sat on the edge, her feet dangling lazily over the stage atop the ramp. "I love you AJ!" and "She's just fine," came out of her mouth, as AJ was stretchered out with whiplash. At this point, Paige was in AJ's head, and her mere presence was enough of a distraction at ringside to cause AJ to lose to Eva Marie twice via surprise rollup. The second time was an underwhelming go-home moment from Smackdown before Summerslam, which in some ways was a good payoff, but too short.
(PG-era blading? Credit: WWE.com)
Both women found the chemistry their Battleground bout was sorely lacking. They only had seven minutes to tell their story but they packed as much passion, anger and smash mouth they could before the coda: Paige embracing AJ's unconscious body in her lap and kissing her cheek--the new Diva's Champion. I simply don't understand why this match couldn't have gotten five more minutes. The buildup was there. The audience has been responding and it would have taken nothing away from anything else on the card. The short but solid bout got a lukewarm follow up on Raw this week.
Maybe I was spoiled by watching Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose follow up a match-of-the-year candidate in their Summerslam lumberjack bout with a Raw main event that was EVEN BETTER! Maybe my expectations can get too high for WWE, but the best they could come up with was a rehash of the "distraction leads to rollup" stuff of the last month. Paige was handily beating Natalya. As she, rather sexily, straddled Nattie before giving a series of trademark head butts, AJ's music played and she skipped down to the ring and--you guessed it, Paige was distracted and lost via surprise rollup. AJ made up for it with some fun mic work, barely containing her anger. I smarked out as she said "I love you Paige... I dedicate my life to you Paige . . ." and her eyes did that little crazy dance that's been making her career since pushed CM Punk and Daniel Bryan through a table. That entire bit sums up the rollercoaster ride of ho-hum interspersed with great bits. Why have the umpteenth surprise rollup? It would have served the story better, and AJ's monologue at the end would have been even more potent if Paige had cleanly won her bout with Natalya, and AJ jumps out of the crowd as Paige walks up the ramp, raising her title revealing in her own hubris. AJ bounces her head off the ramp's cold steel and utters those same words . . . "I love you Paige, I dedicate my life to you" and she leaves the semiconscious champ with a much more compelling wakeup call as she staggers back to her feet.
(It should take more than five minutes to get to this point. Paige locks up Natalya in the PTO on Smackdown-Credit: WWE.com)
Professional wrestling, while narrative in its most simple form, still will fail an audience when monotony sets in. Paige and AJ have something very special here, but WWE's creative(?) team suddenly don't know what else to do beyond the "distracted! lol" thing. Who knows why this otherwise compelling Divas feud is already in a rut when other options could raise the stakes in the allotted timeframe, but it doesn't need to be that way. WWE has to raise their own bar for what constitutes a great Divas feud and let the workers tell the best story possible.
Wes Kozalla
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